A Framework for Monitoring and Security
Authentication in Cloud based on Eucalyptus
Zefeng Gao
Xiaoyong Li
School of Computer Science & Technology
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Beijing, China
gao_ze_feng@163.com
Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Distributed Computing and
Service, Ministry of Education
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Beijing, China
lxyxjtu@163.com
Abstract—Since the cloud computing was proposed, the research
of cloud instantaneously swept the world and all kinds of cloud
products have appeared in public eyes. But if the cloud platform
security is not guaranteed, companies or individuals will not run
and store their own data in the cloud, especially since the
Hollywood nude-picture scandal event put the cloud computing
to the point of a struggle. So how to put these cloud product
promotion out and make interest to the company becomes the
company's biggest problem, and the credible cloud’s service has
become an urgency to implement. In this paper, we are
concerned with trust in the cloud computing. Paper mainly
launches the discussion from the application layer and
infrastructure layer. The monitoring system collects data from
cloud system real time, and makes the corresponding judgment
according to the analysis results. At the same time, the system
will report the data to the third party to record and modify the
system rules timely. By these means, the cloud system can
improve the stability of the service and make it more credible.
Index Terms—Cloud Computing, Eucalyptus, KVM, XEN.
I. INTRODUCTION
On September 1, 2014, foreign hackers used the disk
system vulnerabilities of iCloud to steal the Hollywood actress
nude photos and release in the network by BBS, it was the
Hollywood nude-picture scandal event that shocked all over
the world last year. With the popularity of smartphones and the
cloud computing, the cloud services[1] bring great convenience
to the people, which allow people to share pictures, video,
documents, applications, and other important data by the crossplatform in real time, however, if the cloud account is stolen,
their data will also lose and may cause huge losses. Apple Inc.
note that hackers did not directly intrude into the storage
service system of iCloud, but the invasion of actress personal
accounts from the terminal. Whether it is ICloud service
system problem or account theft problem, the question caused
by this matter is worth to think about whether or not the cloud
service is safe [2]. There are a variety of cloud advertisement
on the Internet now, advocating how good their cloud platform
is, to let users rest assured to buy and use their service, but I
think we should have a seriously reconsider before buy.
The trusted cloud computing is to provide people with the
cloud platform management services that can be trusted and
ensure their data safe, and it bases on virtualization, that aims
to make full use of the resource and service providing by the
infrastructure provider. Cloud computing can be divided into
three levels of service: infrastructure as a service (IAAS),
platform as a service (PAAS) and software as a service
(SAAS). At present there are a lot of products to solve how to
implement the cloud platform, but no perfect answer to protect
a cloud platform safer.
The potential dangerous [3] of cloud security is one of the
key elements of cloud services that can be accepted by the user
and is also one of the main obstacle of the application of cloud
computing. In addition to the possibility of large scale
computing resources system failure, there is much hidden
danger of cloud computing, for example, lack of unified
standards of the applicable laws and regulations as well as the
protection of user’s privacy [4], data sovereignty, migration,
transmission, safety and disaster preparedness, etc. In terms of
data privacy protection, anyone that needs the information that
is stored in our computer must be authorized, and it breaks the
law if hackers intrude into our computer illegally. However,
when a user’s information stored in the cloud, there is no clear
law that prevent the cloud service provider and other official
bodies to view our data and what kind of punishment will be
happen to provider or other official bodies because of the
leakage of privacy.
This paper proposed a framework for monitoring and
security authentication in Cloud based on Eucalyptus. We are
mainly concerned with protection of data privacy and
detection of potentially hazardous and dangerous from the
application layer and infrastructure layer.
II. RELATED WORK
Eucalyptus [6] is an open source software infrastructure to
realize cloud platform with practical cloud computing cluster
or cluster of workstation, it was proposed by a research project
of the University of California School of computer science at
Santa Barbara. Eucalyptus cloud contains 4 components:
walrus, CLC, CC and NC. CLC is the controller component
that is mainly responsible for the management of the whole
system in the Eucalyptus clouds. It is the main entrance to enter
the Eucalyptus cloud for all users and the administrators. The
ICSPCC2015
978-1-4799-8920-1/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE
This work is supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (61370069), Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation (132032) and Program for
New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-12-0794).
Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Atilim Universitesi. Downloaded on January 21,2022 at 18:09:12 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
controller component CC is responsible for the management of
the whole virtual network in Eucalyptus. CC maintains all
information about Node Controller running in the system, and
is responsible for the control of life cycle of NC. The requests
based on SOAP or REST interface are sent to CC and CC route
the request to the NC that has available resources. NC controls
the host operating system and the hypervisor. SC implements
of the S3 interface of Amazon as the storage service in the
Eucalyptus. The joint with SC and Walrus uses to store the
virtual machine image, the kernel image and RAM disk image
and the user data.
In Eucalyptus systems, there are some remote login
sessions and data that need to transfer between server and
client, and SSH is the way to ensure session secure. The Secure
Shell (SSH) protocol [7] has been a popular tool since it was
proposed in 1995, which provides mutual authentication,
encryption, and message integrity. It is mainly used as a secure
remote shell to access files (SCP and SFTP) and establishes
tunnels for other application layer protocols. On the client
perspective, SSH provides two levels of security verification:
Security authentication based on password and based on
security keys.
Eucalyptus was proposed to make full use of the system
resources, and the virtualization technology is a major means to
achieve the goal. Virtualization [8] is a technique that computer
components run in a VM but not the real machine.
Virtualization technology can make a single CPU simulation of
multi CPU parallel and allow a platform to run multiple
operating systems at the same time, and the application can run
without mutual influence in the independent space, thereby it
can significantly improve the working efficiency of computer.
XEN[9] and KVM[10] are the famous Virtualization
technology applying for the Linux.
III. THE FRAMEWORK DESIGNING
Because Eucalyptus is the open source project, we can
accord to our own needs to add or remove some function, and
Linux has relatively higher security performance, so we choose
Linux and Eucalyptus as the research object to achieve a cloud
computing platform. In this paper, we mainly study cloud
security from two aspects: the application layer and the
infrastructure layer. First of all, we assume that there is a third
party that is credible, such as national department, etc. In
addition, my paper mainly focuses on the design of framework,
so the methods that check the legitimacy of operations will not
be detailed elaborated.
Fig 1 is the model of certification system of third party.
First, certification center verify the service provider’s identity,
if verification passed, he would submit data to the certification
center and check them legitimacy according to the strategy, if
unusual data is discovered, system will immediately notify
service consumers to let them verify the validity and carry on
corresponding processing. The system certification strategy of
third party is a learning process, it is only the basic legal
verification at the beginning, if there is a new condition and
confirm it legal, it will join into authentication strategy, and if
finding some action illegal, it will directly join the blacklist,
which speeds up the legitimacy certification and correcting the
mistakes, but for some ambiguous operation, it must be
checked according to the legal process step by step.
Because the third party is not in the same LAN with the
Eucalyptus System, so we must ensure session safe. Secure
shell protocol (SSH) is a protocol that provides secure remote
login and other secure network services in unsafe network. The
way based on key security verification needs to rely on the key.
So we have to create a pair of keys for ourselves, and put
public key to the server that you will access to. If you want to
connect to the SSH server, client software would request to the
server with your key for security verification. If server receives
the request, it will look for your public key in the server's home
directory, and then compare it with the key you just send. If
two keys are consistent, the server will encrypt challenge with
the public key and send it to the client. After client software
receives it, you can use your private key to decrypt and then
sends it to the server. OAuth2.0 is also a protocol that allows
the user to let third party applications access to the private
resources that the user is stored in a site.
Fig.1 Operation Audit Center
Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Atilim Universitesi. Downloaded on January 21,2022 at 18:09:12 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Draw lessons from with these security modes, we can
register the server to the third party with public key and accord
to the above schema to validate. So it must be verified before
the connection between the server and the third party. If
verification is not successful, certification system will send a
message to the corresponding infrastructure provider and
notify the service consumers at the same time. This will avoid
the middlemen attacking the system and ensure data security.
Because not in the same LAN, there are some data that
needs to transfer between the user terminal and the servers, so
we must have a means to ensure the data safe. The digital
abstract algorithm and encryption are often used to ensure the
security of data in the network, so we can draw lessons from
these methods and use this way to validate resource of the
system. In Linux, file is the only way of equipment existence.
The information that is monitored differs depending on the
type of the configuration entry. For standard files, the file
content is monitored; for folders is the folder listing; for
commands is the output of the command execution as well as
the code of the commands themselves. The information is
recorded in the way with digital abstract and the encryption,
and uploaded to the third party at the same time. The system
compare these files with records in a regular interval, if
abnormal, report to the third party and check them according to
the process, especially like the operations that files are
modified frequently. We could group these operations
according to the weight, which bases on the damage to the
system and the operation that has the greater weight has the
higher priority of alarm. It is conducive to find and handle
problems in a timely manner. Hollywood event was triggered
because of not noticing the problem timely.
At the same time, we must ensure the legitimacy of the
client’s operations, so we should add a monitoring module in
the system. In Eucalyptus, CLC is the only interface that the
client enters the cloud, and provides the logical decision for
cloud, it controls execution of client authentication service and
turn the client's request to the task. We learn that the CLC node
is the center of Eucalyptus from above description, so we can
add a monitoring module in CLC node to record the operation
of the system with the form of array:{file operation, operation
type, operation time, operation user}.System encrypt these data
and send them to the authentication center to save. Certification
center regularly checks these operations, and if finding things
abnormal, system will immediately sent text messages to the
service consumer and mark this record. Every once in a while,
such as a month or less, the certification center should check
the whole system, if it is qualified, the earliest log of the
lawful operation will be removed.
In the Eucalyptus, the infrastructure providers are the
special body and may bypass the Eucalyptus and directly
access to the physical host data, or pass the Eucalyptus
loophole to directly access to the cloud customer's VM and use
the network sniffers method to steal and modify the data.
Because they can directly access to the hardware, infrastructure
providers can install malicious hardware and mount attacks on
the system.
To eliminate the danger like above, we use XEN as the
example to discuss. For Eucalyptus system using XEN for
virtualization, it uses the mixed mode and set up a privileged
Domain (Domain0) that is used to manager other XEN
management Domain and provides a virtual resource service.
Domain0 contains a real device drivers that can directly access
to the physical hardware and is responsible to interact with API
that XEN provides, it also manage XEN virtual machine
environment through management tools of the user mode. So
we can consider Domain0 as the management center of this
physical machine, and install a monitoring module on Domain0
that is responsible for monitoring infrastructure providers, if an
unidentified operation is noticed, it will notify the third party
and service consumers at the same time and infrastructure
providers must explain it operation to verify the legitimacy.
Fig.2 The Framework for Monitoring and Security Authentication
Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Atilim Universitesi. Downloaded on January 21,2022 at 18:09:12 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
At the same time, the infrastructure providers may modify
the boot-loader. Once a malicious program is booted, it will do
great damage to the system, but it is not easy to find. In order
to solve this problem, we suggest server developers to add one
hardware record module to record the encrypted content of
boot-loader. It is the first job that checks the correctness of the
boot-loader after the server is powered up. If find the bootloader modified, the server will not powered up normally.
In the above, we mainly introduce the Framework for
Monitoring and Security Authentication from two aspects. We
achieve the software solution in application layer, but the
hardware solution in physical layer is not because of the
specific characteristics. Fig 2 is the model of the Framework
discussing in the above.
IV. THE FRAMEWORK EVALUATION
In order to validate the feasibility and validity of the cloud
computing security verification framework, we judge it from
two aspects, first of all, it has the following characteristics:
z In the application layer, it can detect the user
operation type to test whether it is the cross-border
operation, the framework also can verify whether it is
legitimate users and intercept unreliable operation.
z In the service layer, it can detect the general operation
of infrastructure providers and verify the legality.
z By adding some functional hardware, the framework
prevent service provider to steal the user’s data.
z
The validation framework also has the ability of selflearning. If some operations are determined as the
legitimate operations, these operation would be added
to the white list and not verified any more.
In addition to the above features, we also select one
physical machine that has been monitored with the security
authentication and allocated the task, which aim to validate it
feasibility by testing the usage of CPU, Memory and so
on(mainly testing the aspect of software verification, because
hardware requires server manufacturers to provide some
support).
There are two screenshots from our monitor system. Fig.3
is one hour statistical chart of CPU, record is the average value
of every minute, x is the time and y is the CPU usage. Fig.4 is
one hour statistical chart of memory, x is the time and y is the
memory usage.
From the screenshots, we can reach the following
conclusions: in the period of task handling, the usages of CPU
and Memory are still both relatively stable and have a
difference of about thirty percent between lower and upper, and
they are also under the seventy percent and have a reasonable
state.
From the conclusions above, we can learn that this
framework not only does not influent performance so much,
but also it can protect the system from threat. So the framework
is feasible and could be applied to the Eucalyptus system.
Fig.3 CPU Usage
V. CONCLUSIONS
This paper presents the safety monitoring scheme based on
cloud services of Eucalyptus, aiming to improve the quality
and meet the needs of users with high quality and safety. We
mainly discuss the solutions from the service layer and the
infrastructure layer, which ensure the system security by
monitoring system files and boot loader and judging the
operation by the authentication strategy of self-learning. At the
same time, we are further researching on cloud monitor scheme
to defend the outside intrusion.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported by the National Nature Science
Foundation of China (61370069), Fok Ying Tung Education
Foundation (132032) and Program for New Century Excellent
Talents in University (NCET-12-0794).
Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Atilim Universitesi. Downloaded on January 21,2022 at 18:09:12 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Fig.4 Memory Usage
REFERENCES
[1] Kalagiakos,P. ,“Cloud Computing learning,” Application of
Information and Communication Technologies (AICT),
2011,pp.1-4
[2] Ryan K L Ko. “TrustCloud: A Framework for Accountability
and Trust in Cloud Computing.” IEEE World Congress on
Services,2011,pp.584-588
[3] Khalasi Gaurangkumar. “To Achieve Trust In The Cloud”. 2012
Second International Conference on Advanced Computing &
Communication Technologies. 2012,pp.16-19
[4] S. Pearson and A. Charlesworth, "Accountability as a way
forward for privacy protection in the cloud," Cloud Computing,
2009, pp. 131-144
[5] S. Pearson ,”Toward Accountability in the cloud,” IEEE Internet
Computing,Jnly/August issue,vol.15,no.4, 2011,pp.64-69
[6] Daniel Nurmi,Rich Wolski. “The Eucalyptus Open-sourCe
Cloud-computing System”. 9th IEEE/ACM International
Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid,
Shanghai,2009,pp.124-131
[7] Oliver Gasser. “A deeper understanding of SSH:Results from
Internet-wide scans,” Network Operations and Management
Symposium (NOMS) ,Krakow,2014,pp.1-9
[8] Supakit Prueksaaroon. “An Implementation of Virtualization
Cluster:Extending Beowulf Cluster uing Virtualization Cluster
Management and Image Storage,” 6th International
Conference,Pattaya,2009,pp.700-703
[9] Fagui LIU. “A Xen-based Data Sharing & Access Controlling
Method,” Intelligent Information Technology Application,
Nanchang, 2009,pp.7-10
[10] Ankit Anand, Mohit Dhingra. “Resource usage monitoring for
KVM based virtual machines,” 18th International Conference
on Adavanced Computing and Communications(ADCOM),
Bangalore,2012,pp. 66 – 70.
Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Atilim Universitesi. Downloaded on January 21,2022 at 18:09:12 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.